It isn’t that I made a decision, after the unexpected but seismically “minor” storm-trailing quake, to get back on a train with the river to my left and let the city recede behind me. It’s that Leslie, one of the members of Anti-Love, sent out an invitation to a doublefeature home screening of Gaslight (1940) and Gaslight (1944)—films we’d discovered almost none of us knew, though the verb “to gaslight” had come up both casually and as a subject of scrutiny in several of our meetings—with a promise to share her fresh harvest of two Gas & Guns plants and one new-to-her strain called Shimmer. I was due back the next day anyway; I just caught an earlier train.

The train was replete with commuters, a time slot I usually avoid. Usually avoided. People returning to their suburban and exurban homes after a day at the office inspired petty judgement of a kind I would rather not be forced to feel: an unholy blend of pity, contempt, and self-incrimination tempered by a doomed tenderness.

In the end Ezekiel had caused little but traffic problems in the city, but as the train moved northward and I was able to transfer my attention from the depressed commuters (“Why should I be compelled to sell my life bit by bit so as not to die?”) to my habitual eavesdropping on the conductors and café staff, I became aware that the storm had wreaked significantly more havoc in the north, a realization that morphed from hearsay to fact as the landscape on the non-river side was overtaken more and more by the dying limbs of downed trees, chopped into chunks by the highway or train service and stacked in zoomorphic heaps by the tracks’ edge.

How the cloudscape out the window of a moving train’s café car, heavy gray and low, is frame by frame animated behind the car’s live action, how the attention of the viewer takes it all in simultaneously, foreground and background and asynchronous surround-ground, how you could describe it as aspect to aspect rather than moment to moment, like a Miyazaki film, how you could describe it like a dream.

A thick instant. Sometimes the whole train seems to lean. But my bladder was full so I made my way to the toilet at the front end of the café car, stumbling only once into the suited shoulder of a silent, laptop-engrossed businessman. I slid the door shut forcibly once inside, and watched the yellow lock indicator alight.